Decoding Kirin 650 Processor

Decoding Kirin 650 Processor

Whenever the processor talks come in our conversations these days, we believe that the need of highly powerful efficient has forced companies to strategies their handsets by foremost thinking about these SoCs. Thus, for the past handful of years, the smartphone market has noticed revolution in manufacturing node. The process of making a chipset that powers the smartphone or any other smart devices. Though, here we are more concerned about the handheld devices, which are smartphones.

We feel Honor is one such brand who has kept its focus strong in this field. The main reason for such commitment from the Chinese smartphone brand was because of the will to offer something unique and powerful that not only stands up from the nuisance in the competition. But also makes it’s quite affordable to own it.

That’s why the brand recently launched a mid-range handset with an innovative, powerful chipset that can outdo even the flagship chipsets like Snapdragon 820 in a combination of efficiency and performance. Today, we are here to decode what’s inside the Kirin 650 Processor, which is one of the reasons why this new Honor 5C smartphone is a good performer.

Manufacturing Node

The Kirin 650 chipset is manufactured using 16nm FinFET Plus technology, which makes it the second processor in the market right now to be manufactured using this node. It is believed that smaller the size of manufacturing node, the more efficient and powerful processor it can be. But that seems to be falling out of place, as TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, have achieved an excellent performance and power efficiency using the 16nm (nanometer) process.

The best scenario to prove that 16nm offer better performance and power efficiency than 14nm based chipset is to tell you briefly about the latest iPhone instance. Apple has used desktop class A9 chipsets in their latest iPhone iteration, which are fabricated by Samsung’s 14nm or either TSMC’s 16nm process. It is reported that 16nm process based chipsets are offering better overall performance when compared to 14nm process chipset on iPhone.

Thus, it can be argued that Kirin 650, which is the only second chipset with 16nm, moreover an in-house processor makes it quite easier for the company to optimize the performance and battery life. As well, as make sure the software is aligned with performance with the hardware. Overall, resulting in using less energy, increase in speed and offering an all-round solution to lagging, slowness and heat build-up.

CPU & GPU Features

Using the big.LITTLE architecture the Kirin 650 aims to deliver best of both worlds, i.e. performance and efficiency. The chipset comprises of total eight cores, out of which four cores clocks at 2.0 GHz, they have been marked as high-performance cores, meaning they are big in CPU architecture. While the remaining four cores clock at 1.7GHz and the reason is that they are high-efficiency cores, as they’re the LITTLE in CPU architecture. This combination makes Kirin 650 one of the most satisfying chipset in the mid-range smartphone market.

Talking about the GPU, the company uses Mali-T830 GPU, which is said to be offering more compute capability per shader core than the previous generation. Thus, enabling Kirin 650 to handle more complex content such as advanced 3D gaming. This Mali GPU promises to offer maximal performance from minimal silicon area. It has a double number of FLOPs (FP32 MAD) than previous generation GPU and offers support for high-fidelity content.

Interesting fact:Kirin 650 is equipped with a silicon chip that is integrated with a dedicated security module within the silicon chip, thus ensuring user security such as fingerprints, keypad, and voice.